A business fable by Adrian McPhee
Inside the Alignment-Industrial Complex
Every week, this insurer handles 250 calls about mileage corrections. Letting customers make the correction online would save them a phone call and reduce the work advisers must do manually. Customers want it. Shareholders have been promised digital transformation. Management calls it a priority. Two years later, the calls are still coming.
For executives, operators, product leaders, engineers and boards.
At the fictional insurer in this book, every department can meet its targets while the company fails to deliver. Agreement changes none of the permissions required to finish. Keeping the departments aligned becomes a business of its own, with budgets and careers to protect.
While the company negotiates permission, a competitor can improve its service and learn from the result. Giving someone the authority to finish means taking power from people the company is already rewarding. Those people help decide what changes. The agreed improvement is better alignment.
An ordinary correction becomes a programme. Every function can explain its part. The customer still cannot change the number.
A board receives accurate reports about a company it cannot inspect. People closest to the work know what the account leaves out.
Moving authority makes ordinary improvement possible. It also exposes failed boundaries, duplicated costs and work that must stop.
The customer is still waiting.
The bonuses have been paid in full.
Explore every chapter through a short opening preview, about two and a half paragraphs each. Choose what interests you, then continue in the complete book.
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Adrian McPhee is an entrepreneur, engineer and technology leader. For more than 25 years, he has built software, designed and implemented operating models in multi-billion-dollar companies, and helped create successful startups across insurance, logistics and financial services.
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